by July Hall
What? “Of course I was,” Charles protested. “I admit, I seem to have misunderstood, but I wanted to—”
“To get me ready,” Sandra said. “To stand next to you.”
He ran out of words.
“You said it from the beginning,” she continued. Her eyebrows drew together. “When I was with Bradley. You said he ought to give me nice things because he was a Magister, and I was his girlfriend, and that’s how a Magister should behave. I can’t step out with you and not look like a million bucks, can I?”
“I’d love you in a potato sack,” Charles said.
If she’d been feeling indignant, that stopped it in its tracks. She blushed again and didn’t seem to know where to look.
“Maybe I don’t know anything about being poor,” he continued. “But I do want to give you everything, and it frustrates the hell out of me that you don’t want it. Isn’t that natural?”
“You said I’d get everything whether I wanted it or not,” she said. “Back in the study. You made it sound like you were going to keep me locked in a dungeon or something.”
“Ah.” He rubbed a hand over his face. Christ, that whole thing had gone so wrong. “Well, I can’t do that, obviously. That’s not what I meant.”
Sandra looked at the duvet and picked at something invisible. She was silent for a long moment and then said in a low voice, “I need a shower.”
Charles’s chest grew cold. Personal hygiene had never sounded so sinister. “All right.”
Still not meeting his eyes, she asked, “You want to come too?”
* * *
They’d showered together before, on their first night, in the guest bedroom. In hindsight, Sandra should have been surprised at how easy and natural it had seemed. Washing someone was a very intimate act, even after you’d been having sex with him. Maybe especially then. It meant you had to deal with the mess left behind after all the fun was over.
That was exactly why she wanted it tonight, though. She was tired of talking while she was still sticky and gross. And she couldn’t let him out of her sight for a second, even while she got clean, because then she might make the wrong decision. Or he might get the wrong idea.
Charles had done most of the work last time. In hindsight, that was not surprising. Tonight, she decided to pull her weight. Beneath the hot, hissing spray, she soaped him up with a soft washcloth while he watched her and kept quiet. She covered most of him with the cloth, but she hesitated when it came to his cock and balls, not sure how rough she ought to be. The washcloth might feel unpleasant after they’d banged each other raw. She couldn’t help blushing a little. At least the heat of the steam accounted for her red face.
“Just your hands,” Charles said. He didn’t look remotely embarrassed. “And don’t overdo the soap.”
“Oh, okay.” Feeling awkward but not wanting to avoid it or anything, Sandra lathered her hands and cleaned him carefully. It was weird to be shy about this, after everything they’d done.
His cock stirred when she touched it. She looked up at his face in disbelief. He shrugged.
“Jeez,” she muttered. “You have no shame.”
“None at all,” he agreed. “My turn. I hope it’s all right if I just use my hands.”
It was fine by her. Sandra kept her eyes closed and shivered while he ran his soapy hands all over her shoulders, arms, and breasts, down to her belly. When he got to the juncture of her thighs, he touched her very, very gently. “Is it sore?” he asked.
“Kind of, yeah.”
He was careful. She’d stopped at his privates, but when he’d finished with hers, he soaped up his hands again and continued downward. Once more, he knelt before her, washing her legs. She looked down at the top of his head, at the water running through his dark hair and probably down into his eyes.
A sweet but painful feeling twisted at her heart and grabbed at her guts. All her rational considerations took a hike. Maybe it was okay if he locked her in a dungeon or if she ended up on Page Six. Maybe she could put up with all kinds of things if it meant they could stay together. She could adjust. She could learn. In a moment like this, she felt like she could give up anything, so long as she didn’t have to give him up too.
He stood up and got a look at her face when she wasn’t ready, before she could get herself back under control. He turned the shower knob off. “Right,” he said. “Back to bed with you.”
A few minutes later, her hair was still damp, but the rest of her was clean and dry when she curled up next to Charles beneath the duvet, between the crisp sheets. Through the open bedroom door, she could still see the flames flickering in the fireplace out in the sitting area.
I’d be proud to have you on my arm. Versus, I’d love you in a potato sack. So he was okay, she guessed, with either outcome—coming out or remaining hidden. Just so long as she stayed.
She couldn’t remain hidden anymore, so she tried to imagine coming out. She tried to picture the emeralds around her throat as she sat next to Charles at the head table. Or having dinner with him at some five-star place. Shaking hands with billionaires, knowing what they thought of her. Some of them would be like Richard Zhou. They would see her as a toy and nothing more. A pretty thing that belonged to Charles Magister, like a car or a painting.
That wasn’t the worst. Her family would think she’d lost her mind. That would take some fast talking to fix. Stephen would stop saying nice things about her and Rosalie would absolutely flip her shit. Sandra would have to work hard to prove herself to the people who loved Charles, even if there weren’t many of them.
And somehow she would also go to her job every day and back to Brooklyn at night, to the bathroom she shared with her sister and the sink full of dirty dishes.
Probably not for much longer, though. He said he wanted her to share his life. He said what was his, was hers. Once he got started, Charles didn’t stop, and he didn’t do things halfway. So she tried to picture that too. Sharing his life for real—and letting him into hers.
Then she tried to imagine the other thing. Walking away. Not seeing him anymore. She couldn’t. Two months ago, after listening to Bradley all the time, she’d thought that Charles had to be the biggest asshole on the planet. Now she didn’t want to live without him.
That was the real danger, the one she’d wrestled with all along. Fear of ridicule was one thing—she could stop being a wuss about that. It was past time. But the biggest hurdle of all was opening her heart to someone who had the power to pulp it. She’d never forget how she’d felt in the study, when she’d thought he was leaving her and she’d just wanted to disappear.
But he’d said he loved her instead. She was the one who really had tried to leave, and he was the one who’d spoken up when it looked like it was all over. He was the brave one. She could be brave too. She had to be.
She closed her eyes. “Um,” she said. “I’m going to get over it. I’m not going to care what they say about me.” He went very still against her. “None of them matter. We matter, and you…” She took a deep breath. “You’ve got to listen. You can’t just love me, you’ve got to trust me and you’ve got to listen, or nothing else is going to make any difference.” Tonight had taught her that much.
“I understand,” he said after a moment.
She hoped that was true. “What do I need to do for you?”
She heard him swallow, and to his credit, he waited long enough that she was pretty sure he’d thought about it. He said, “I know this will sound ludicrous after tonight, but you must trust me too. Trust me to do what I say I’ll do.”
She bit her lip. “The whole…cherish thing?”
“Yes.” He sounded like he was smiling now. “The whole cherish thing.”
The notion of being cherished by Charles Magister was both the most thrilling and terrifying idea in the world. She’d been serious earlier, even in the heat of passion. He was not like other people she knew. It stood to reason that he didn’t love like other people she knew.
> And maybe Sandra’s love was very ordinary compared to his, but it didn’t feel like that to her. It felt like the most extraordinary thing she’d ever known. He might not need it—he said he didn’t—but he had it anyway.
“Yeah. So.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, then.”
He went still against her. “Okay, then?”
Sandra started to tremble a little bit. “We’ll do it. I’ll…I’ll share your life. You’ll share mine.” Her tongue froze at the next thing she had to say. But if this was going to work, she had to be as brave as he was.
He touched her face so lightly she could barely feel it. He skimmed his fingertips over her cheek, through the downy hair at her temple, back over the shell of her ear. It made her tremble, and she gasped.
“Sandra,” he breathed. He brushed his knuckles over the line of her jaw. She closed her eyes.
“So, um,” she said. “What’s mine is yours, too. Not that there’s a lot of it.” She tried to laugh. Come on, come on. Say it. “Uh, just so you know, Kristen’s going to hate you. She kind of already does. My parents might not, but...” She cringed. “Sorry. I don’t want to assume anything about what you want.”
“I want to meet your parents.” He kissed her forehead. “I want to meet your sister.”
Her heart was beating so hard she was afraid she’d pass out. At least she was already lying down. “Okay. I’ll…I’ll think about how to tell them. It’ll be, um, kind of a surprise.” His chest moved against her. It might have been a muffled laugh. Yeah, she could see how her family wouldn’t be his biggest worry right now.
She probably shouldn’t mention her mom’s shotgun. Kristen would bring it up first thing, anyway.
“I want to tell them before we go out in public,” she added. “I want them to find out from me, not somebody else. Tomorrow.”
“Of course.”
He was stroking her hair, even though it was still damp. She fumbled for every ounce of courage she’d ever had, far more than she’d needed for anything else that had happened tonight. “I love your hands,” she whispered.
“My hands love you.” He touched the corner of her mouth. She turned her head, showing him her throat, and he stroked that too. “My hands love you very much.”
Maybe she was going to start crying again. “I love your mouth.”
He kissed her cheek and the line of her jaw. “My mouth loves you,” he whispered against her skin.
This had to be a dream. Right? It couldn’t be happening. She wasn’t really getting what she wanted, all she wanted, dropped into her lap right after she’d thought everything was over. Was she?
Sandra managed, “I love…I l-love your…” She opened her eyes and looked up into his. “I love you.”
A shiver ran through him. But instead of looking touched or grateful, he said, “Don’t feel obligated,” through his teeth.
She stared at him. Seriously? “I don’t!”
“Sandra.” He swallowed harshly. “Please. Don’t say that if it isn’t true. I mean it. I don’t need it.”
The hitch in his voice took the hurt out of his words. Sandra touched his chin again. “You don’t?”
“I don’t…” He seemed to struggle. “I’ve managed so far without you loving me. But if you tell me you do, and you don’t mean it, and later…”
“You’ve never managed without me loving you,” Sandra said.
Charles stopped breathing for just a second.
So did she. Sandra gulped and looked away from his eyes, focusing on his shoulder. “Can we go for a walk in the morning?” she asked. “On the beach? Maybe I can borrow some of Rosalie’s stuff again.” She’d have to anyway. She couldn’t go around wearing her torn ball gown. She was taller than Rosalie, but a few things were bound to fit well enough—leggings or—
“We can go for a walk,” he said. He touched her chin. She looked into his eyes and found an expression there she had never seen before. Not desire or satisfaction. Whatever it was, she seemed to be the only thing in the world he saw. “We can go out to dinner. We can go to Tuscany.”
She pressed her lips together so that she really wouldn’t start crying again, even though it was okay for him to see that now. Old habits were hard to break, and she didn’t want to be over-the-top anyway. It was pointless to cry when you were happy, right?
“We can go to sleep,” Charles added.
Sleep? Oh. Sandra realized her eyes were already half-closed, and her muscles seemed to have no strength left in them. No wonder. What a day. It seemed like twenty years ago that she and Indira had been getting their nails done.
Indira…Arnaud…she wondered what they would say…they’d be so surprised, because everyone thought she was…
Wait. Before she passed out, there was one thing she suddenly, really wanted Charles to know. She touched his chest. “Hey.”
“Hmm?” He traced his thumb over her chin. The new, almost dazed look was still in his eyes.
“I, um…in high school, I dated this guy. When we broke up, he called me an ice princess. Like I couldn’t feel anything, like I was just cold.” She sighed. “Part of it was that I wouldn’t have sex with him.”
Charles didn’t laugh. “But not all of it.”
“No.” She searched his face and tried to come up with something pretty to say, anything that could tell him what he meant to her. But he meant too much. He meant almost everything. In the end, she just whispered, “I love you.”
EPILOGUE
Police Officer Cooper
Demarcus wasn’t paid enough for this.
Not for busting strip clubs on an anonymous tip, bursting in there yelling, “Police!” while all the girls jumped out of laps or clustered in confusion around the poles, wondering what the problem was this time.
And the captain wasn’t exactly on good terms with the guy who owned this club, so that wasn’t gonna help.
The city needed a solid bust, and this wasn’t a complicated situation—no mob types or gangs ran this place, and it wasn’t a playground for the rich and famous. Just a bunch of average Joes who showed up for stag parties or the sad sacks who were there to escape from their lives while a stripper made them come in their pants.
Everybody had to make a living.
But when Demarcus, Fred, and Lana made their way into the VIP room, he saw that the guests tonight were a little more highbrow than usual. Two kids sat on a couch surrounded by four women in G-strings and pasties. One of the boys, a blond, had a girl in his lap. The other one, with darker hair, was bent over a line of coke on the table, clearly funneling it straight up into his nose.
The blond kid looked up and yelled, “Fuck!” He smacked the other boy in the shoulder and shoved the girl off his lap. The dark-haired boy looked up, one nostril ringed with white, and gasped.
Demarcus sighed. The girls cringed or bared their teeth, no doubt wondering how long it would take to be questioned or if they’d be arrested too. “You ladies wait outside,” he told them, and they filed through the door, muttering. He pulled out the handcuffs and said to the boys, “You’re under arrest. Get on your knees, hands on your head.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” the blond one protested. Closer up, Demarcus could see that neither of them were as young as he’d thought at first—they were in their mid twenties, maybe. Sure as hell old enough to know better. “Test me, man, I’m clean!”
“We will be doing that, sir,” Lana said, pulling out her own set of cuffs.
The dark-haired boy just looked at the three of them before lurching to his feet and wiping off his nose, like that was going to do any good. The blond boy was dressed casually, but this one had on a tailcoat and white tie, like he’d just come from a really fancy event. “Aw, shit,” he muttered. “Seriously?”
“Hands on your head,” Demarcus repeated, “and get on your knees.”
Dark Hair—good-looking kid, Demarcus would give him that—glared at him with all the jittery energy of someone in the middle of a rush. “
Come on,” he said. “Don’t make this harder on yourself, buddy. Walk away.”
Demarcus reached down to the Taser on his hip. The blond kid fell to his knees and put his hands on his head at once. “Shit, Bradley. Just do it.”
“Shut up, Jeremy. How much do you want?” Dark Hair—Bradley—asked as he glared at Demarcus and his fellow officers. “You’ll get it, just get the fuck off my back, okay? I’m celebrating tonight. Good shit’s finally coming my way.” He pointed at them. “I’m not a guy you wanna mess with, trust me.”
Demarcus and Fred exchanged a look.
A minute later, Lana was cuffing Jeremy while Fred had Bradley bent over the table. Demarcus pressed the Taser against his shoulder in warning. “You are under arrest,” he said. “You have the right to remain silent—”
“You’re going to regret this!”
“Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law—”
“You don’t know who I am! You don’t know who my uncle is!”
“You have the right to an attorney—”
“Charles Magister! Ring a bell?”
“If you cannot afford an attor—” Demarcus cut himself off. He exchanged another look with Fred and then with Lana, who was hauling Jeremy to his feet.
“Yeah,” Bradley panted. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Demarcus gritted his teeth as he reholstered the Taser. If this asshole was telling the truth, then he was related to a very powerful man. The Magister Foundation and the New York City Police Foundation did a lot of talking to each other. Charles Magister and the Chief of Police shook hands in a bunch of photos.
“He’ll do what I want,” Bradley continued. “He’ll do whatever I tell him. Now let me up, you fucking pigs!”
Demarcus inhaled sharply. He looked at the lines of coke on the table. It didn’t get more red-handed than this.
Shit. The badge had to be worth something. Brothers got ten years for weed. And this little prick was high as a kite and calling him a pig?